Straw Man

Straw Man is a spy thriller set in Rome, Ireland and Libya in the 1980s.

On 12 October 1984 an IRA bomb intended to kill Margaret Thatcher explodes at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton. In the wake of the outrage, MI6 Rome Station Chief Haydon Talbot is tasked by his boss Mark Glasson with ensuring that planned shipments of the powerful explosive Semtex from Colonel Qaddafi’s revolutionary regime never reach the Provisional IRA.

Charlie Lomax, a would-be entrepreneur living in Rome, is seeking to trade off his friendship with construction magnate Andrea Vispoli, who manages covert accounts for the radical Libyan regime. Vispoli introduces Charlie to Libyan spymaster Ahmed Khalfari and his Rome based acolyte Nasir-el Maghrebi.

Haydon recruits Charlie, codename DAEDALUS, and dispatches him to Tripoli with instructions to penetrate senior levels of the Libyan security establishment. He is charged with offering banned material for Qaddafi’s nuclear weapons programme, in the hope that he might glean information about the shipments to the IRA. Charlie makes substantial progress, until an indiscretion by Glasson leads to Charlie coming under suspicion. He is arrested and brutally interrogated in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim jail.

Haydon deploys an elite squad of reconnaissance operatives led by Sergeant Barbara ‘Babs’ Stoner to follow Nasir, who leads them to a meeting in Geneva with IRA soldier Seán Docherty. Haydon orders them to snatch Docherty and turn him ‘the hard way’, but Barbara’s team are blown while breaking into Nasir’s flat, searching for incriminating documents, and Nasir flees Rome. Haydon loses all trace of Docherty and Nasir. The search has gone cold, and Haydon sees no way to reactivate the op.

Haydon uses forged communication intercepts to deflect Libyan suspicions away from Charlie, who is eventually released from Abu Salim. Khalfari and Nasir plan to use Charlie to bribe and recruit Haydon, but, after Barbara’s team successfully break into Vispoli’s office and obtain compromising material on Nasir, the tables are turned, and Haydon blackmails the Libyan spy into revealing details of imminent shipments of Semtex. Nasir returns to his bosses in Tripoli, claiming to have successfully recruited an MI6 operative, when in fact he himself is now in the pay of the British Secret Service.

A first shipment of arms is landed at a remote beach in Ireland. Seán and Nasir arrange for the next shipments and arrange to meet in Geneva for Nasir to hand over $1mn in cash, another element of Libyan support for the IRA. In a dangerous game of cat and mouse, Barbara’s team track the arms from Malta to a cache near the border with Northern Ireland, only to lose the scent once again. Haydon now has one last chance to seize a shipment of Semtex, which Nasir informs him is about to be loaded.

The vessel carrying the arms explodes in the Bay of Biscay, killing Seán. Haydon concludes that Glasson has ordered Barbara’s team to assassinate Seán, thus exposing Nasir, his mole in the Libyan secret service, and endangering Charlie. Furious, Haydon disobeys Glasson’s order to send Charlie back to Tripoli, intercepting him outside Ciampino airport in an attempt to keep him out of Abu Salim. Haydon ultimately saves Charlie’ life, as Vispoli’s private jet explodes whilst entering Libyan airspace. It is not clear whether the attack is a direct retaliation for the Bay of Biscay incident, as Vispoli was the man who introduced Charlie to the Libyan establishment.

This is a story of greed, disillusionment, and the conflict between ‘high matters’ and personal conscience.